Hybrid materials that are built up from inorganic and organic components form a very important development within materials technology. These materials combine the favorable properties of inorganic and ceramic materials, such as high mechanical strength and a high degree of wear and scratch resistance, with the favorable properties such as a high degree of flexibility and impact resistance of organic materials. Hybrid materials are formed from inorganic and organic components by bonding these chemically with each other at a molecular level. They can be built up as interwoven networks, as interwoven networks mutually bonded by covalent chemical bonds and as interwoven networks having therein homogeneously distributed nanoparticles, which may or may not be covalently bonded, of, e.g., silicon, aluminum, zirconium, cesium, molybdenum or titanium oxides, and/or nitrides and/or carbides thereof.
Coatings manufactured from hybrid materials have a multiplicity of applications. It is possible to apply these materials in a patterned or completely covering manner. The combination of flexibility and hardness makes them ideal as coatings for plastics, in particular plastics from the ophthalmic industry. The low permeability (oxygen, water) of hybrid materials provides for excellent barriers for food packaging and through adaptation of the organic network, anti-adhesion layers for use in bathrooms or on kitchen utensils can be manufactured.
Currently, hybrid coatings are manufactured by means of wet-chemical techniques and deposited on the article of interest, a substrate, by means of dipping, spraying, flow-coating or spin-coating. However, these methods for the manufacture of hybrid coatings require several process steps, long curing periods, prolonged preserving steps and the use of large amounts of solvents.
In the use of CVD (chemical vapor deposition) according to the prior art, it is difficult to deposit a hybrid material of a desired composition under controlled conditions as a coating on a substrate. The activation in a chemical vapor of the separate components requires completely different conditions for the inorganic and for the organic component. As a result, obtaining a fully integrated network of the two components is very difficult.